By contrast with Barack Obama, as Scott Lemieux says Andrew Johnson really was an example of a president who stood in the path of progressive policies. The Republican congressional majorities of the Johnson years had lots of perfectly good ideas, and Johnson consistently acted to undermine them.

That said, while thinking about the lost opportunity of the Johnson years it is worth sparing a mention for the greatest centrist wankers of all time—the moderate Senate Republicans who refused to vote to convict Johnson on impeachment charges. It’s true that the impeachment prosecution was a bit trumped-up and essentially amounted to a politically motivated “no confidence” vote. But the commonly heard view (this was in my high school history textbook, for example) that convicting Johnson would have led to some kind of pernicious parliamentary system seems really blinkered. For one thing, lots of countries have parliamentary systems and are doing fine. But more importantly, it would have led to no such thing. The particular political circumstances of the Johnson impeachment were bizarre. Lincoln had put a Democrat on the ticket for crass political purposes, then been assassinated, bringing a Democrat into the White House despite Republican electoral victories. At the same time, you had a Republican majority in the House and a Republican supermajority in the Senate that would have been adequate to convict. On top of that, there was no Vice President, so stalwart Republican Ben Wade would have taken over had Johnson been removed from office.

That configuration of circumstances will almost certainly never repeat again. And if it does, the precedent that “you can’t use assassination to flip partisan control of the presidency” would hardly be a pernicious one.

Scott Sumner:

Suppose an asteriod destroys the rest of the world. By definition our trade deficit falls to zero. I say our GDP falls sharply. I assume the trade deficit worriers would say it would increase, because we’d have no trade deficit.

I don’t really think that’s fair as a riposte to people worried about the US-China exchange rate, but it’s certainly a striking reminder that there are multiple dimensions to this.

Matt Taibbi has the latest in the endless series of articles and blog posts by everyone under the sun claiming everything in the world would be great if only Barack Obama were more left-wing. Taibbi is a much better writer than most people, so his contribution to this literature has a great deal more panache. That said, not only does his piece have the various factual problems noted by Tim Fernholz but it suffers from the same basic conceptual flaw as the vast majority of this literature—it ignores congress.

For example, the name “Ben Nelson” doens’t appear in the article. Nor will you read about Olympia Snowe. Nor Blanche Lincoln. Nor any of the other pivotal actors in the senate, whose decision to vote “yes” or “no” defines the limits of what’s possible. Near the end of the article, Taibbi seems to be finally getting on track. He notes that the draft financial reform legislation is actually pretty good. But:

The aide pauses. “The question is, though, what will it end up looking like?”

He’s right — that is the question. Because the way it works is that all of these great-sounding reforms get whittled down bit by bit as they move through the committee markup process, until finally there’s nothing left but the exceptions. In one example, a measure that would have forced financial companies to be more accountable to shareholders by holding elections for their entire boards every year has already been watered down to preserve the current system of staggered votes. In other cases, this being the Senate, loopholes were inserted before the debate even began: The Dodd bill included the exemption for foreign-currency swaps — a gift to Wall Street that only appeared in the Frank bill during the course of hearings — from the very outset.

Having briefly zeroed-in on the problem, which is not Obama or his Wall Street crony advisors, but rather the members of congress who take okay ideas and make them worse, the very next sentence is “The White House’s refusal to push for real reform stands in stark contrast to what it should be doing.”

The implicit theory of political change here, that pivotal members of congress undermine reform proposals because of “the White House’s refusal to push for real reform” is just wrong. That’s not how things work. The fact of the matter is that Matt Taibbi is more liberal than I am, and I am more liberal than Larry Summers is, but Larry Summers is more liberal than Ben Nelson is. Replacing Summers with me, or with Taibbi, doesn’t change the fact that the only bills that pass the Senate are the bills that Ben Nelson votes for.

The problem here, to be clear, isn’t that lefties are being too mean to poor Barack Obama. The problem is that to accomplish the things I want to see accomplished, people who want change need to correctly identify the obstacles to change. If members of congress are replaced by less-liberal members in the midterms, then the prospects for changing the status quo will be diminished. By contrast, if members are replaced by more-liberal members (either via primaries or general elections) the prospects for changing the status will be improved. Back before the 2008 election, it would frequently happen that good bills passed congress and got vetoed by the president. Since Obama got elected, that doesn’t happen anymore. Now instead Obama proposes things that get watered down or killed in congress. That means focus needs to shift.

Ezra Klein’s take on the Conrad/Gregg deficit commission is that “It’s theoretically insulated from politics, and thus offers an opportunity for people of goodwill to come together and do the hard work of the country. And that will be fine right until the agreement is struck and released into the wilds of the political discussions, at which point it will die.”

I think that’s really too generous. Or, rather, I think that if we actually could get to the level Ezra is describing here, that would constitute enormous progress. A Republican Senator agreeing, even in the most general sense, that the long-term fiscal gap should be closed in part through higher taxes would be a huge step forward even if there were no agreement whatsoever on the specifics. Then you wouldn’t get people saying things like the problem with Barack Obama’s budget is that it “spends too much, taxes too much and borrows too much” when a simple eyeball of CBO’s analysis makes it clear that his plan spends too much, borrows too much, and taxes too little:

There’s just no other analysis a person who cares about the long-term deficit could possibly offer. And yet the one who said taxes need to be lower is none other than Judd Gregg himself. And that’s the essence of the long-term deficit problem. People on the left think the long-run projected deficit is too high and should be made lower, but people on the right think taxes are too high and should be made lower. This belief is simply incompatible with a serious desire to reduce the long-run deficit.

The point’s been made before, but I think Mark Kleiman’s explanation of why uncertainty in climate science* makes the case for action stronger rather than weaker was very good and clear. It’s important to note that this doesn’t require an appeal to a completely generalized and hazy “precautionary principle,” it’s implicit in any reasonable concept of cost-benefit analysis.

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